


The Picture of Paul in Grey

by Celebratory Penguin (cpenguing)



Category: The Beatles
Genre: AU, F/M, Gen, John still dies in 1980, M/M, Magical Realism, McLennon, Strong Language, Vague reference to a sexual relationship but nothing graphic, but the only traumatic death is John's and it's the canonical version, other people die along the way because no one lives forever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-21 14:12:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12459429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cpenguing/pseuds/Celebratory%20Penguin
Summary: John faffed around with a portrait of Paul for fifteen years. Then things got strange."John studied the outline and reached into his pocket for a pencil. He drew Paul's face as he had seen it today, open and hopeful in the moments before John had sent him on his way. He fashioned a jaunty lift to Paul's chin. His pencil lingered on the slightly parted lips that curved up into the little smile John had woken to every morning in Paris and on secret, shared pillows all over the world.There. That was his Paul."





	The Picture of Paul in Grey

**Author's Note:**

> While this story was partly inspired by Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Grey," this painting's power doesn't work the same way. 
> 
> The final pose is reminiscent of John Singer Sargent's "Dr. Pozzi at Home" but, again, is slightly different here. Side note: Wilde based the painter Basil Hallward on Sargent. So there you go, full circle.

**1965**

It was daft, starting with hands. Who starts portraits with hands? 

John shifted in his chair, squinting down his nose at the corners of the paper where the disembodied hands gestured to him. He took his eraser and softened the edge of a forefinger here, changed the curve of a thumb there. He shaded in the places where veins stood against the pale, tissue-paper skin of the backs of the hands. 

Beautiful hands. Strong, supple. Soft, too, save where the strings had worn the fingertips down until they shone like silk. 

But they needed to hang off of something. John closed his eyes for a moment, calling the figure to memory. Long legs and arms, slender torso, long neck, round face with a hint of a heart shape to the chin. He drew the outline in one continuous stroke as if touching the body itself. Shoulders straight forward, one hip canted a bit higher than the other with that foot resting on the ball rather than the sole. 

A shadow fell over his paper. He started, as if caught drawing something dirty during a maths class, then he heard Cynthia's voice as she leaned over him. 

"That's Paul, isn't it? I love the way you did his stance. Wish you'd draw like this more often, love." 

John craned his neck and placed a kiss on his wife's cheek. "Ta. I'm thinking of doing this for his birthday, properly, in oils and all. What do you think?" 

"I think he'll be thrilled. It's quite a gift!" 

"Would be, if I'd ever finish it. I started one years ago but I never quite did his hands right, so I got discouraged and threw it away." 

"The hands look perfect now. I've got some old canvases up in the attic - let me get a couple out for you. Some new paints, too, how about it?" 

He smiled fondly at her. "In other words, find yourself a hobby besides booze and pot?" 

"I'll look up those canvases, then," she called over her shoulder as she walked briskly away from him.

John huddled back in the chair and started drawing again. He'd attempted a portrait of Paul when they were in Paris for John's twenty-first birthday, but the art at the Louvre gave him a profound distaste for his own work and the sketches had been left behind. Then the band had taken off and their lives weren't their own anymore. Now that they had a few weeks to relax after filming and recording, John found himself wanting to go back to the portrait, wanting to re-capture the Paul he knew before. 

Sometimes John didn't recognize the New Paul, the PR guy and all-around Good Egg who had become their _de facto_ spokesman by virtue of his good looks and charm. He found himself missing the slightly rougher edges Paul used to have, back when he was hungry and horny and striving. 

Perhaps that was why he was progressing so well with the hands and body but having problems with Paul's face. They used to drop their masks when it was just the two of them, but nowadays they were never alone. Now John kept his fear and tenderness carefully hidden behind an acerbic curtain, while Paul put up a cool, collected wall that kept John from seeing his insecurities and the warmth he missed more and more as The Beatles took over their lives like kudzu. 

Leaving the face blank for the moment, John sketched Paul's dark hair, keeping it a little wild as it had been after the first dramatic haircut in Paris. He took his guitar-callused index finger and made a few smudges that looked like early morning light reflecting off the crown of Paul's head. When he started to rough in the angles of Paul's face, his hand began to tremble a little. 

With an annoyed huff, John closed the sketchbook and put it on the coffee table. He'd work on it more in a day or so. 

***  

**1969**

So he'd gone and done it.

Married the tweedy American cow.

And didn't have the balls to tell anyone beforehand.

Or at least didn't tell HIM.

Not that John expected to stand at Paul's side, keeping the nervous groom calm as he waited his turn before the Registrar. Not that he'd looked forward to signing the marriage certificate and making a little speech that would bring a flush to Paul's cheeks. Not that he'd anticipated taking the couple out to dinner afterwards, congratulations and olive branches all rolled up in one grand gesture.

Not that he CARED, you understand. 

He didn't care when he pushed the cat off the sofa, swearing under his breath even as he tickled her warm belly by way of apology. 

He didn't care when he made tea, let it get cold, made more tea, let that get cold, then drank it anyway because what difference would it make? 

He didn't care about doing a life-sized portrait of naked Paul with a tiny penis by way of a wedding gift/fuck you statement. 

He didn't care when he grabbed his sketchbook from the bottom of a closet and went in search of the canvases Cynthia had left for him. 

And he certainly didn't care enough to take the attic stairs two at a time, except he did just that. 

John poked around, hunting for the life-sized canvas he knew was up there somewhere. It didn't take long to find it and set it upright, leaning it against the back wall where dappled sunlight came through the windows underneath the gabled roof. John opened the old sketchbook and thumbed through it until he found the drawing of Paul. 

He stared at it, genuinely surprised at the quality of his work when he put his heart and soul to it. Mindful of the age of the paper, John drew a grid over the figure, then sketched out the same number of squares on the canvas. All he had to do was copy, to enlarge, to make Paul as big as life.

After a moment he started with the hands again, then sketched the outline of Paul's body. He mapped Paul's contours with the charcoal pencil the way used to with his fingers. This Paul didn't tremble at his touch, didn't take in huge gulps of air in between frantic kisses, didn't fall apart under John's mouth. This Paul was as still and unsatisfying as a chalk outline in a murder mystery. 

John didn't realize he was crying until he saw the small sketch in his hands, peppered with tiny wet droplets that soaked through the page and made Paul disappear. 

He found that he really did care, after all. 

*** 

**1971**

"How Do You Sleep?" was in the can at last.

John walked briskly back from the Record Plant, happy with the final edit and ready to get to work on the rest of the album. Back in London, George had joined in with a little more glee than one would expect from someone who nattered on about karma as much as he did. When John listened to the playback, he realized that George's guitar solo sounded like a stab in the heart.

Ringo went along to a certain extent, although he didn't play on the track. He protested John's lyrics, the ones that accused Paul of stealing the tune of "Yesterday" and calling him a cunt. Hearing Ringo say, "That's enough, John," in that sad, heartsick voice, reminded him that there were lines that shouldn't be crossed in his presence. Inexplicably, Ringo was somehow still fond of Paul, and he steadfastly refused to believe that John wasn't.

John had scoffed at Ringo, at the very idea. Fond of Paul? Impossible.

Just as well that Ringo didn't know that John had paid a ridiculous amount of money to transport Paul's unfinished portrait from London to New York. He kept it in a neighbor's attic space, where Yoko would never know about it, and that was where he chose to work on it again.

He no longer had the sketch he'd done so long ago and he didn't bother getting any kind of reference photograph of Paul. There was no need. John had Paul memorized: not just the flesh and bone of him, but even his soul.

Starting with the outline he'd made the day Paul married Linda, John filled in gaps here and there, periodically standing back to admire his work. He opened the tubes of oil paints, inhaling their sharp, pungent aromas. The cocaine in his system gave the smell an extra kick that made him smile.

John pulled out a dozen paintbrushes, thin and broad, sable and nylon, and started mixing colors on the palette. Blue-black for the hair, lead white mixed with a sickly brownish-green for the skin. Red for the eyes, demon eyes, that he painted at Picassoesque angles.

This Paul was so different from the beautiful man of the sketch. It could hardly even be called a portrait of a man. The painting John worked on with such drug-induced fury was some kind of satyr, a monstrous, bloated, pathetic being with lips glistening with the blood of...of...of John himself?

John painted himself in Paul's hirsute hands, small, broken, his throat open and bleeding from the gash Paul's yellow teeth had made. With wide brushstrokes he added rivers of arterial-red blood flowing from his own body to feed the monster Paul had become.

How would Paul sleep when he saw THIS?

Somewhere between his own ragged breathing and the smack of paintbrushes on canvas, John could hear Ringo in the studio.

"That's enough, John." 

The timbre of Ringo's voice had been deeper than John could remember, deeper than a bass drum, sadder than the loosened strings on a discarded bass guitar. 

"That's enough, John." 

He froze in front of the painting. His blood sludged coldly through his veins as he surveyed the afternoon's work. 

It was terrifying. But it was his own fear. 

It was ugly. But it was his own soul. 

Horrified, John reached for a palette knife with hands so shaky that he dropped it three times before getting a strong enough grip to use it. Breathing heavily through his mouth as if the smell of the paint could impart a disease, John slashed through the wet layers and flung them to the ground until they were a misshapen lump of waxy colors. 

When there was nothing left but the outline of Paul, John packed the canvas away and covered it as if putting a shroud on a corpse. 

*** 

**1976**

John leaned his head against the door, breathing quickly and trying not to be sick. His words, needlessly harsh and cruel, echoed in his brain. "You can't just turn up here." They weren't even his words, they were Yoko's, the ones she instructed him to say next time Paul turned up on their doorstep with guitar in hand. John didn't build the bomb, he just dropped it. 

On his dear, treasured friend. 

Paul had nodded in silence and turned away, but not before John noticed the way his face just sort of melted and his eyes turned cloudy. John had his mouth open to beg Paul to come back; his arms ached to go around him and hold him fast. But Yoko came up gracefully behind him and closed the door. 

"It's for the best, John. You know I'm right." 

John couldn't bring himself to nod. He was dizzy with grief and loss and shame that he wasn't strong enough to stand up to Yoko, to tell her that just this once she was so, so wrong. That he and Paul needed each other - couldn't she see that? 

Why did love have to be a zero-sum situation? 

He felt Yoko's hand trail along his back before she walked away from him. He was alone with his misery as he imagined the way Paul's back would hunch over as he walked dejectedly to the cab stand and waited for someone to take him away from the Dakota and John, forever. 

No. It couldn't be forever. They'd see one another again. John would make certain of that. 

Perhaps Paul was still out in the corridor, sitting on the floor and biting a fingernail as he waited for John to come to his senses. With a sudden thrill of hope John flung the door open and called out to him, but the name hung unheard in the empty hallway. 

John stormed up to the attic and tore the sheet off the painting, staring at the scraped-off canvas, at the outline where Paul had been. He had poked at the painting in Los Angeles after Paul and Linda came to see him. He had wanted to express his relief that Paul still held a corner of his heart open to him after everything that passed. 

But he'd be damned if he would render either the mustache or the stupid, stupid fucking mullet, so the portrait remained unfinished yet again. 

John studied the outline and reached into his pocket for a pencil. He drew Paul's face as he had seen it today, open and hopeful in the moments before John had sent him on his way. He fashioned a jaunty lift to Paul's chin. His pencil lingered on the slightly parted lips that curved up into the little smile John had woken to every morning in Paris and on secret, shared pillows all over the world.

There. That was his Paul.

Gleeful, not noticing how much time he was spending, John gave the underpainting a fresh, slightly pink cast and then covered it in the beautiful colors of Paul's fair, Irish skin. He modeled each eyebrow and eyelash with tender care, and made certain that Paul's gray-green-brown eyes sparkled. 

That was his beautiful Paulie. 

John finally noticed that the light was waning, so he dipped his brushes in turpentine, wiped them clean, and took a longing glance back at the picture before he went downstairs again. 

If Yoko had noticed his absence, she wasn't saying anything. John gave her a guilty peck on the cheek and went into Sean's bedroom. "Hello, my boy," he whispered as he picked his son up and ran his fingers over Sean's nose and cheeks. 

Immediately, Sean started to sneeze, his round eyes looking stunned. The places where John touched him began to turn bright red, and Sean burst into tears. 

Yoko came in a few moments later and touched her son's face. She sniffed, scrunching up her nose. "What's that smell? Were you painting, John?" 

"Yes," he admitted, wondering why he felt so furtive. 

"I think he's allergic - maybe the paint, maybe the solvent. You should be more careful." Yoko was on the telephone a moment later, summoning a doctor. 

John laid Sean back in his bed. "I'm sorry, little one," he murmured. "I'll be more careful next time."

But there wasn't a next time until Sean was five years old. 

***

**1980**

Once Paul had been released from the Japanese prison and was safely licking his wounds in Scotland, John sent him an exquisite, silvery-gray silk kimono. He didn't include a card. Paul sent a thank-you note anyway. 

When John heard "Coming Up" for the first time, he had a new stereo installed so he could listen to it over and over. He finally summoned up enough courage to call Paul and talk to him, telling him that the song had awakened the sleeping creator in him and that he was writing again. Paul sounded delighted. If he held a grudge over being sent away years ago, he didn't show it. 

In October, when the entire McCartney clan took a trip to New York, Paul phoned John. "I want you to meet my little boy," was all he said. John knew how much Paul loved his girls, but he also understood how much he had been longing for a son. When Paul handed James to his almost-uncle, John was struck by the enormity of it all, by how the second generation John-and-Paul circle was completed with this sweet-faced, golden-haired child. 

John began working on the portrait again that night. He added the gray silk kimono, placing Paul's right hand over his heart, where the lapels crossed, and the left at his cocked hip. Paul's bare right foot, long-toed and high of instep, peeked out from the hem. In one of the foulard dots near Paul's right wrist he painted a tiny self-portrait. 

He finished it a few months later. As he put the canvas carefully into a tall, narrow crate, he smiled to think what an extraordinary Christmas gift it would be, how appreciative Paul would be of John's hard work. Perhaps it would be the final balm on the wounds they'd inflicted on one another for, Christ, had it been a decade? 

When he turned to leave the attic, he realized that the painting was unsigned. He opened the lid of the crate and hastily loaded a slim brush with lead white. Across the gold band of Paul's wedding ring, he signed and dated his masterpiece. 

"John Lennon, December 7, 1980." 

*** 

The next night he was hanging onto consciousness by the slimmest of threads when the gurney wheeled him into the emergency room. Blood flowed from his back, his chest, his mouth, even his nose, but strangely the pain had ceased. 

He tried to listen to something other than the orders the paramedics and doctors were barking at one another. There was music, something airy, something familiar. 

"All My Loving." Muzak. _Paul would laugh, wouldn't he?_

Then the pain returned, slamming into him, making his chest feel leaden and useless against his attempts to draw breath.

 **All my loving**...

 _Yoko. Sean. Julian. I'm sorry, I can't, I'm sorry_. 

... **I will send to you**... 

 _Paulie. Someone tell Paulie about the painting_. **All my loving** _went into it._  

... **darling, I'll be true**... 

 _At least Paul will always be beautiful_ , John thought as the music died.

*** 

**1983-2031**

The letter on Dakota stationery announced that the second floor tenants were moving away. Yoko wouldn't have glanced twice at the notice except for the handwritten note at the bottom: "You might want to collect your things from our attic before the new owners move in." 

Their attic? 

She sent one of her assistants to find out, and he came back with quite a tale. John had "bought" the neighbor's attic space when they first moved to New York and was keeping a bunch of boxes up there. It didn't seem as if there was anything special from the looks of the cartons, but Yoko thought she should probably open them up and take a look to make sure. 

Finding the key was a difficult task; she had a ring of keys John had left behind the day he died, and not one was labeled. On the ninth try the lock creaked open and Yoko stepped into the attic she hadn't known was theirs. There were a lot of boxes. She started with the ones that looked to be the right size to hold records, and to her amazement she found first-pressing Beatles albums in mint condition, along with several of the ones they had done together. She was less impressed to find George's and Ringo's albums - a couple of them still in shrink-wrap - and she was downright annoyed to find a complete collection of Paul's solo and Wings LPs. 

Everything about Paul annoyed her, from his pretty face to his relentless success. She resented the closeness he and John had been starting to enjoy in the late seventies. She'd been John's new love, but Paul was his old one and she suspected that they never got over one another.

Even Paul's fruitfulness made Yoko cringe. Not just the music, although there had been a lot of it, but the children, his perfect little brood, while she and John had suffered so many lost babies before Sean. It was too easy for Paul, always had been. 

Sighing, Yoko turned to some of the other boxes. There was Beatles memorabilia, mostly still in the original packaging, along with books of poetry, old, dog-eared art textbooks, and a sheaf of postcards he'd gotten from friends and family, mostly Julian and Ringo. 

Some value here, then. John had left most of his fortune to her and Sean, but money didn't go as far now as it had in 1980. Yoko's biggest fear - apart from having ended up second-best in John's affections - was losing the apartments in the Dakota. The sale of these items would surely keep them afloat for several more years. It was all for Sean, for her little boy, John's precious son. 

She stood up and regarded the huge rectangular box against one wall. God only knew what was in there. The lid gave way with surprising ease and Yoko gasped to find herself face-to-face with a portrait of Paul in a gray silk kimono, looking as beautiful as he had in the old videos from 1965. 

So that was what John had been up to. 

It took a few minutes to find the signature, and when she did, she smiled. This painting would take care of Sean for decades, if she could just hang on to it until Paul died. It was valuable now, but it would be worth a fortune once the subject was no longer on this earth. 

When she examined the painting more closely she realized the breadth of John's artistic ability. All of the talents John had squandered sat heavily on Yoko's shoulders. She had urged him into experimenting more with drugs, had sent him on his lost weekend, had kept him in their apartment instead of letting him fly free. But she couldn't risk losing him to Paul. 

She carefully draped a blanket over the canvas and had one of her aides move it to John's old music room, where it was placed ignominiously in a closet behind a filing cabinet. 

She could wait.

Meanwhile, the living, breathing Paul stayed astonishingly good-looking. 

Yoko would unwrap her prize possession now and again over the years. Usually it was on John's birthday, or the anniversary of his death. Sometimes she would look at it just to see Paul the way John had seen him, as if that somehow brought her closer to John. It didn't seem fair that Paul was so young and fresh, both in real life and in this magnificent painting, when John himself was gone and his son scarcely remembered him. One day when these thoughts burdened her too much, Yoko grabbed a charcoal pencil and grayed Paul's hair, adding a few lines around the corners of his too-pretty mouth.

If she realized that the next few press photos of Paul looked noticeably older, then it didn't connect.

Yoko thought about sending the painting to Paul as a gift after Linda died. After all, she understood the pain of losing the love of one's life. She remembered trying to befriend Linda, but there had always been a wall between them, built brick-by-brick by all the pain their husbands had inflicted on one another. She went up to the attic to take a look at the painting and was surprised to see that some dampness had attached itself to the canvas, just below Paul's eyes. Perhaps the work was too fragile to move, she decided, choosing instead to send flowers despite Paul's request not to. 

The next day, Yoko sent a lavish bouquet to the McCartney girls - like their mother, they deserved something pretty at a time like this - and bought a de-humidifier for the closet. 

Then once, years later, after a vicious argument about re-wording the Lennon/McCartney labels on the songs Paul had written alone, she stormed upstairs and ranted for half an hour, accidentally putting her pen through the heart of the painting when she gestured too widely. She felt an immediate pang of guilt. When the phone rang fifteen minutes later and Ringo told her Paul was in the emergency room having a stent put into his heart, Yoko began to suspect that there was more to the painting than met the eye. 

No one would have believed her, of course, but she knew. She KNEW. Something John had done or said connected Paul to this painting, body and soul. And John probably had never known. Would never know, now. 

One day, curiosity overcame her and she spent an afternoon making Paul's nose thicker and wiping out some of his eyebrows. Another time she tried to paint knotted veins on the beautiful, pale hands, but for some reason paint never stuck to them. Anything she added would flake off instantly and land at her feet. 

Sometimes she would touch the hands, hoping to feel the flesh that had touched her husband so long ago. 

Time passed, and Paul - the real Paul, the one singing "Here Today" to her dead husband ten, twenty, thirty, forty years after his murder - looked surprisingly good for his age. It was those hands, still youthful and supple, that looked like miracles. 

Which they were. But only Yoko knew why. 

She aged. Paul aged, too, mostly in a mirror image of the painting as Yoko doodled on it. George died in the intervening years, and Ringo as well, but Paul was still alive when Yoko drew her last breath, Sean clinging to her hand to the very end. 

Sean, still spry in his fifties, asked his half-brother to help him clear everything out of the Dakota. He was going to sell the place and move somewhere warm, somewhere without the daily, painful reminders of the father who had been taken away from him so cruelly. Julian joined him and the two of them emptied closets, packed box upon box, and drank a shocking amount of wine. By the time they made it to the music room, long emptied of most of John's possessions, they were having a much better time than the occasion warranted. 

Julian shoved aside a filing cabinet and found the life-sized canvas. "Look at this!" he crowed, pulling the blanket away from the portrait of Paul. "I think Dad painted it," he added, frowning, "but Paul didn't look like this in 1980." 

Sean didn't remember much from 1980, which was a blessing considering how the year had ended, but he agreed that it didn't resemble the Paul he recognized from photos taken about that time. "It's fucking enormous. What should I do with it?" 

Julian cocked his head. Sean shivered; the way Julian's chin and nose looked in profile awoke painful memories of their father. 

"Could I have it?" Julian asked after a long pause. "I'll pay you for it, of course," he added moments later. 

"No, no." Sean shook his head. "I'm just surprised, is all. It's yours, Jules - shit, you had to wait so long for even a scrap from Dad..." 

"It's okay," Julian said. He wrapped Sean in a hug. "In some ways, Paul was more of a father to me. I'll hang onto it, maybe give it to him for his ninetieth." 

Paul died at eighty-nine. 

Julian hadn't seen the painting since that day at the Dakota - he had stored it in a climate-controlled vault along with the photos and postcards he'd had to buy from Yoko. He looked forward to showing it to Paul's children. 

But Stella came alone. She drove up in a taxi, dressed in chic black that accentuated how slender her figure still was. She seemed to have inherited her father's great genetics, Julian thought as he bounded up to her and gave her a kiss on the cheek. 

"Didn't Mary or James or Bea want to come along?" he asked, linking her arm through his. 

She shook her head. "Too emotional for them." 

"But not for you?" 

"I'm made of tougher stuff. C'mon, let's see this painting of Dad that John did." 

As they walked toward the door of the vault, Julian said, "It's partly a gorgeous portrait and partly caricature. I can't imagine what Dad was thinking - he must've been pretty pissed to add some of the features he did." 

"They were famously pissed at each other, when they weren't madly in love." 

Julian blushed, his mouth hanging open. Stella grinned at him. "C'mon, you knew. Everyone knew. I heard it from MUM." 

"Yeah. It's just weird, coming from you." He fiddled with the keypad and opened the door. "Anyway, just wanted to warn you." 

He flicked on the light and opened the airtight box that held the portrait. While he was standing that close, he couldn't see it clearly, but he heard Stella's astonished, pleased gasp. 

"God, Jules, I had no idea your dad could paint like that!" 

Julian stepped back and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Stella. For the second time that day, his mouth fell wide open. 

Stella's eyes filled with tears and she flung her arms around Julian. "Thank you, thank you, it's beautiful." 

It was. 

It was a portrait of Paul just as he had been in his youth, not a sign of a grey hair or aging on him. He was perfectly preserved by John's hand, painted with such tender affection that it seemed voyeuristic to look at his beautiful face. 

Julian didn't know how it happened, but when he heard Stella's happy tears, he didn't care. This was the Paul he remembered holding his hand, bringing his mother a rose, singing "his" song on television for the world to see. 

For an instant, Julian thought about telling Stella what the picture had looked like when he and Sean first found it, but what would be the point? Maybe it had been a trick of the light, or too much wine. Or maybe it was a miracle, as much of a miracle as two Liverpool boys finding one another and setting the world aflame.

Yes, Julian thought as he traced his finger along his father's signature. John Lennon and Paul McCartney had been nothing less than a miracle. 

***

END 

 

**Author's Note:**

> With infinite gratitude and love to Bakerstreetafternoon for the conversation that led up to this story and her marvelous beta skills, and to Savageandwise for listening to me pour my heart out and helping me with her insightful comments.


End file.
